noun [from geography and Shakespeare, 2005] 1. A small forest of words in the great metropolis of Brooklyn 2. A collection of ruminations, photographs, and lists on topics including (but not limited to) books, writing, movies, television, theatre, current events, publishing, food, and nonsense 3. The blog of Cheryl Klein, reader, writer, children's books editor, and busy lady about town

Friday, January 25, 2013

The online existence of this preview will be old news to many, but good news to more: Behold the lineup of Scholastic's Spring 2013 books! We recorded it a little bit differently this time, so you get a glimpse inside many of the editors' offices, including mine*, where I talk about the books:

The Path of Names by Ari Goelman, at 13:46 in middle grade -- The ONLY Jewish summer-camp fantasy you'll ever read or need: Diana Wynne Jones meets Chaim Potok in the Poconos, with a wholly original magic and some of the smartest, most believably snarky 12-year-olds ever to appear in a novel. Out in May.

Openly Straight by Bill Konigsberg, at 8:00 in YA -- This has pretty much everything I'm looking for in a novel these days: An original, provocative premise; wonderful characters; a smart, funny, relateable voice; believable consequences to its action; the courage of its convictions in following through on its ideas and story; and pleasure in reading, provoking thought long after. Also: THIS IS NOT JUST A BOOK FOR GAY PEOPLE. STRAIGHT PEOPLE SHOULD READ IT AND WILL LOVE IT TOO. (I feel the need to make that point.) Out in June.

The Fire Horse Girl by Kay Honeyman, immediately after it -- This book satisfied every single teen-girl reader part of me: the headstrong heroine, who was sometimes lonely because of her iconoclasm; the fascinating historical background of Angel Island and San Francisco in the age of the tongs; terrific adventures; a romance whose tiny gestures I could reread again and again. In stores now!

There will be more to say about all of these books in the course of the year. In the meantime, won't you please check the preview out to see them now? Librarian Preview

* Fun fact: The KID LIT Missouri license plate you can see over my shoulder belonged to my grandfather.

Sunday, January 20, 2013

I'm pleased to announce that Writers Digest University and I will again be offering an online, eight-week version of my Plot Master Class, starting later this spring!

Goodness, what a clogged sentence. To detangle it, with elements in order of importance:

Plot Master Class: An extremely in-depth course on the elements of plotting, including purpose, stakes, structure, subplots, and pacing. The goal is to help you understand the point of your novel, how your plot can and should serve that point, and what revisions you need to do to make that plot as tight and powerful as possible. (My book Second Sight goes into some of this, but the class covers it in much greater depth and detail, and also reflects various revisions in my own thinking on plot since I wrote the book.)

Online: You'll read lectures and complete associated exercises interrogating your manuscript and its plot, with the opportunity to ask as many questions of me as you'd like in the online discussions.

Eight-week: I've taught this class as a one-day workshop at various locations around the country; this course distributes those lessons over eight weeks, allowing participants more time to absorb the material and complete the exercises.

Starting later this spring: March 14, to be precise, with homework to be completed before the course begins.

Writers Digest University and I: I developed the materials, and Writers Digest University offers the online setting.

Again: The current session of the course started in November and is coming to an end now; I've really enjoyed it, and the participants say it's been useful to them!

The most common question I get about this course is "Do I have to have a completed draft of a manuscript?" My instinct is that it will be most useful to people who have completed a first draft of a manuscript and are ready to dig back into it, see what they have, and start polishing it up. (After all, the first exercise is to make an in-depth outline of your current book, and later exercises involve analyzing said outline.) But I've heard from a few past students that they took the course without a completed draft, and it helped them figure out where they wanted to take their books.

Sunday, January 06, 2013

But it is AMAZING: just astonishingly good writing with wise and painful things to say about writing, or being human, or pain and death, or reality, and/or the relationship among all of the above.

First, there is this excellent piece from a Magazine editor about why writers (himself especially) don't always follow through on ideas, and how this can be a mixed blessing. Its headline is a good writerly aphorism, even though you can only see the truth of it in retrospect: "Be Wrong as Fast as You Can."

Then, there is this extraordinary story about a young man who shot his girlfriend, then turned himself in; how her parents decided to forgive him, and have worked hard at that forgiveness, with his parents equally involved; and the process, restorative justice, that opens up new avenues of healing for the victims, and (it seems) both punishment and healing for the perpetrator.

Finally, there is this wonderful profile of the writer George Saunders, which pairs beautifully with the forgiveness story, actually: Because they are both about looking at the reality of the world and its pain, and choosing how to respond in a way that is both open to the pain and compassionate to others within it. My favorite quotes from the article:

I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what's inside the box bears some linear resemblance to 'real life' -- he can put whatever he wants in there. What's important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit.

If you have a negative tendency and you deny it, then you've doubled it. If you have a negative tendency and you look at it [which is, in part, what the process of writing allows] then the possibility exists that you can convert it.

Early on, a story’s meaning and rationale seem pretty obvious, but then,
as I write it, I realize that I know the meaning/rationale too well,
which means that the reader will also know it—and so things have to be
ramped up. Einstein said (or, at least, I am always quoting him as
having said), “No worthy problem is ever solved within the plane of its
original conception.” So this was an example of that: my “original
conception” (i.e., the dream and its associated meaning) had to be
outgrown—or built upon.

When something really bad is going on in a culture, the average guy
doesn’t see it. He can’t. He’s average. And is surrounded by and
immersed in the cant and discourse of the status quo. The average person
in the U.S., in, say, 1820, assumed white superiority, and, if he
happened to be against slavery, was for a gradual solution, which
probably involved sending all the slaves back to Africa, notwithstanding
the fact that most of them had never been there and were Americans in
every respect. And this would be the nice, moderate, urbane, educated
person of that time, who fancied himself “progressive.”

One thing I always feel in the midst of trying to talk coherently about a
story I’ve finished is that, you know, ninety per cent of it was
intuitive, done at-speed, for reasons I can’t quite articulate, except
in the “A felt better than B” way. All these choices add up, and make
the surface of the story, and, of course, the thematics and all that—but
I’m not usually thinking about any of that too much, or too overtly.
It’s more feeling than thinking—or a combination of the two, with feeling being in charge, and thinking sort of running around behind, making overly literal suggestions, and those feelings being sounded out and exercised and manifested via heavy editing and rewriting (as opposed to, say, planning and deciding).
The important part of the writing process, for me, is trying to make
choices that push the story in the most interesting direction, by which I
mean the direction that causes the story to give off the most light.
The story’s goal is to be fascinating and stimulating and irreducible;
the writer’s job is to micromanage the text to make this happen.

The artist’s job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery. To intuit it,
and recognize that the story-germ has some inherent mystery in it, and
sort of midwife that mystery into the story in such a way that it isn’t
damaged in the process, and may even get heightened or refined.

If there is one thing I worry about most in the, um, rigorous way I edit or teach plot, it is that too much thinking and too-intense questioning will kill that mystery for writers -- the feeling, the energy, the electric-fence emotion at its heart. And if there's one thing I look for in manuscripts, it's the ability to generate that mystery or emotion (which sometimes can be happy too, I hasten to say). If you can bring it, truly create it, make me weep as the forgiveness story did or feel both sorrowing and uplifted as "The Semplica- Girl Diaries" did . . . We need more people like you writing for children and young adults.

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Ten things I love: Books, trees, stars, roasted vegetables, "Singin' in the Rain," medium-tip blue rollerball pens, oatmeal, community, Scrabble, and my tall black boots.
All opinions expressed here are solely my own and should not be taken as those of the company for which I work.

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Text and most photos copyright (c) 2003, 2005-2012 by Cheryl B. Klein. All opinions expressed here are solely my own and should not be taken to reflect the opinions or official positions of the company for which I work. Thanks for reading!